Kolodny, Annette

ENCAENIA, MAY, 2000
ANNETTE KOLODNY
to be Doctor of Letters

At first glance, Annette Kolodny's career path may seem unexceptional: first she was a teacher and then a university administrator. She taught early American literature at several universities, including the University of British Columbia, before eventually accepting a position as Dean of the College of Humanities at the University of Arizona. Yet, what is remarkable about Annette Kolodny's two careers is that she has excelled in both, quite untypically sending shock waves across academe as she has challenged the scholarly conventions of her field and the hypocrisies of higher education and its administration in the United States. Annette Kolodny has emerged as a scholar and cultural critic with urgent messages about the need for change, and powerful recommendations for achieving it.

If she had followed the advice of her doctors, she would have quit when she was twenty. That is when she was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, just out of college programs at the University of Oslo and at Brooklyn College. The doctors said that she should skip graduate school and take care of herself. She defied their advice and entered the graduate program in English at the University of California at Berkeley. Her years there coincided with the tumultuous period of student activism in the 1960s, and her study of early American literature was further stimulated by such inspiring professors as Mark Schorer, Henry Nash Smith, and Charles Sellers. Despite her admiration for Smith, however, she challenged his metaphoric handling of the American frontier as a "Virgin Land," and characterized his and other male writers' feminized depiction of the west as a male fantasy. In her first book, The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters, she developed her own vision as a feminist critic and followed it with an important second book, The Land Before Her, in which she traced the experiences of women who went west. Margaret Atwood considered the work "masterful" and "a much needed counter-balance to the much-articulated myth of the American Adam."

With her books and numerous articles, Dr. Kolodny expanded the universe of her interests to embrace the historical experience of women and women writers, Native Americans, the environment and its cultural impact, and especially the concept of frontier as a cultural metaphor in American life. All of these themes and her commitment to literary criticism and feminist theory spilled over into much else in her life as she confronted a male-dominated academe, paying lip-service to gender equality, but rarely practicing it. Concerned that women were willing to fight in the trenches for recognition and acceptance but were not prepared to accept the burden of positions where change might be effected, she eventually accepted the earnest pleas of the University of Arizona to go there as Dean of Humanities, which she did in 1988. She left teaching and publishing, which she had loved, and embarked upon a hazardous journey west into her own frontier.

Her experience was, as she has put it, only half bad. The good part was the chance to make a difference, instituting affirmative action to increase minority representation among both students and faculty, almost doubling the number of women on the faculty, and showing her faculty and staff how the university works. But at the end of five years she left the job, convinced that her own and most American universities were fooling themselves into thinking that they can maintain quality and expand opportunities for students while legislators slash budgets and demand more for less. Her 1998 book Failing the Future: A Dean Looks at Higher Education in the Twenty-first Century, is both a scathing indictment of aspects of higher education public policy, and an insightful articulation of developing realities. She is struck by demographic trends that show the emergence of minority groups as, collectively, the future majority of the population. She sees the need for a plural university, life-long learning, and what she calls a "family friendly campus" which recognizes the many kinds of families in our time, and the diversity of their needs. She calls for a return to collegiality, and she stresses the need there is for faculty and staff to know more about how their universities are run, and the constraints under which they operate.

Annette Kolodny is not a superwoman: she has known physical pain throughout her career and has accepted that it places limitations on her. But she has also shown what courage and conviction can accomplish. Among the many universities that have benefited from her wisdom is the University of New Brunswick, where she has impressed faculty and administrators with the clarity of her thought and the vigor of her message. It is entirely fitting that we recognize this remarkable woman whose articulate iconoclasm and stimulating ideas about the future strike home on whichever side of the border they are heard.

From: Honoris Causa - UA Case 70, Box 3